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Limmud’s decision late in the day to drop a speaker from the London Kabbalah Centre, following outrage over his scheduled appearance at next week’s conference, has prompted debate over the limits of inclusion.

Personally, I believe Limmud’s decision was right. Not least, because Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has already taken enough flak from the religious right for his willingness to go to the event. And although he was not directly involved in the Kabbalah Centre controversy, he would inevitably have been sucked into it. This was not the year to have a representative from the centre there.

Critics of the Kabbalah Centre internationally have attacked both its methods and content. Judging from the online Q and A of the London branch, Kabbalah is presented as distinct from Judaism, and Judaism appears even incidental.

I had tried to prepare myself. When people heard I was going to visit Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust they all mentioned three things – the hair, the children’s shoes, and the freezing temperatures.

Having been to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem a number of times I thought I knew what to expect. A couple of shoes here, a lock of hair there.

The controversy continued to rumble more locally this week. At Edgware Adath Yisroel synagogue, an affiliate of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, Rabbi Zvi Lieberman sent an email to his members, with a copy of last week's attack on Limmud by Rabbi Alan Kimche for promoting an "aberration" of Judaism. Rabbi Lieberman said he shared Rabbi Kimche's views about "about Limmud and similar heterodox institutions and the inherent falsification of Judaism which they present".

This week’s sidrah of Vayera is one of the most memorable in the Torah, containing among other things the seminal episode of the near-sacrifice of Isaac, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham’s bold challenge to God to spare the doomed cities, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?”

There is in this action-packed portion a remarkable verse which I confess to having overlooked before. When God ponders the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, He resolves to “go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it” – the cries of their victims suggest a level of wickedness so great that God takes the extraordinary step of descending from heaven to see if it is true.

The image is significant, too, because it is alluded to it in the closing sentence of an early classic of Israeli literature, Khirbet Khizeh, the 1949 novella by S.Yizhar (the pen-name of Yizhar Smilansky, who died in 2006). Set in Israel’s War of Independence, it is the story of a group of Israeli soldiers ordered to expel the inhabitants of an Arab village.